Boeing dreamliner arrives in Britain

Direct flights to Australia but carrying less passengers? Even if there are fuel savings with this plane the temptation will surely be to schedule more flights thus adding to the total of planes and atmospheric pollution, contrails and crowded skies around airports. I'm sure it's a lovely plane, and technologically advanced, but I can't help feeling that less will eventually equal more.

18-hour, 8500 mile journey in one shot. It's hardly going to draw me. I did a 13-hr 6000 mile non-stop run from London to Singapore not long ago and it just about did my head in. Banged up in a plane, albeit a 747 jumbo, for all that time, with insipid movies, bland music, etc. I was bored out of my tree. Even boozing and a book wouldn't relieve the tedium. I think I'd rather go by Aeroflot in a Tupolev or whatever next time if it be possible - change in Moscow, maybe put down in Tashkent and Rangoon ... Much more enjoyable :)

For those of us who have to travel long-haul semi-regularly, the opportunity to get the trip out of the way in one flight is really attractive.

If they could extend the flight range to be able to do say London to Auckland in one flight, I'd be a very happy punter. But most flights from the UK to NZ are two stop-overs, so even if this plane cuts that to one stop-over, that's a big improvement in the experience (keep in mind that when ex-pats like me travel home to places like NZ or Australia, we just want to get there as quickly as possible. Stop-overs are really just a pain in the hoop, rather than an opportunity to check out some new city or airport).

Besides, if you're bored and you're on a plane that long, just sleep! :)

The number of Dreamliner's in operation will remain insignificant, so any improved efficiency will still be a drop in the ocean compared to the overall impact of aviation on the environment. As the number of passengers and flights grows, demand for airlines will increase with the greatest demand coming from Asia which is just discovering cheap air travel. All this new capacity will more than outweigh and offset any efficiency improvements of individual planes like the A380s and the dreamliners coming onto the market.

Seems to me that the most sensible option might be for young women aged 16 and over to be able to go to a pharmacy and buy the repeats of the pill over the counter, once they have been prescribed the right one for their needs by a doctor. And girls aged 13 - 16 should have to go to a GP or family planning clinic to get it, and have access to a bit of discussion about why they need it, what they hope to achieve by using it etc. These girls are under the legal age of sexual consent, and the law exists because their bodies are still going through physical changes and, as they are still children, they need to be protected from sexual exploitation.

I was prescribed the pill at 17, as I was having sex with my boyfriend, but I suffered from headaches, double vision and extreme tiredness, which was explained away as normal for teenagers. It took quite a while to discover that I had an allergy to synthetic progesterone and shouldn't be taking the combination pill. It is important that young women, and particularly girls, receive the right information and contraception for them. perhaps presenting this as a caring approach may encourage girls and young women not to rush into sex before they are really ready.

Anything which helps to avoid unwanted pregnancies is to be welcomed and I look forward to hearing a chorus of cheers from the anti-abortionists.

More seriously, availability of the pill for very young teenagers does raise the real possibility of increasing pressure for girls to have sex before they are emotionally mature, quite apart from the matter of their being under- age. It is essential that better and more widely available education is part of the process, including measures to help young girls build their self esteem so that they, not their peers or their boyfriends, can make the right choices at the right times.

I think there are various issues with this kind of approach, which I'm sure the commissioners and evaluators are looking into.

We need to ensure that pharmacists doing this are well trained and able to offer a safe and confidential space for young people.

Taking the contraceptive pill is more complex than taking an emergency contraceptive pill (pharmacists already offer a very useful service for young people in most parts of the country for this). So young people need to be given 'the pill teach': taking them roughly the same time each day, what happens if they miss one, side effects etc etc. They also need to have a conversation about their general health to check for contraindications of a particular type of contraception or pill. This needs time, space, patience and a working relationship with the young person.

Possibly a system where pharmacists work in conjunction with local services would be good. This would work well for repeat prescriptions (which many women are frustrated about) and a way of making services accessible and convenient for young people.

Training needs to be more comprehensive than simply how to do a proper pill teach too. There have been instances of pharmacists not being able to provide emergency contraception because of their own sexual values. No-one should be forced into doing sexual health work if they don't want to/don't feel that it fits in with their values. However those that do should be doing training that enables them to explore the stigma around sex in society, their own sex education and sexual messages which they may carry around with them, how young people approach services with suspicion and fear etc etc.

Another concern I have is that this kind of focus on providing contraceptive pills can ignore the many other sex and relationships needs of the young person. Sexual health is a helluva lot more than giving someone a pill, or a condom.

The benefits of young people going to a young people's clinic (like Brook or NHS run services) are that the staff and clinicians are more attuned to the issues that we need to address with young people: STIs, relationship health, whether the sex is wanted, whether someone is ready for sex and how to ensure that sex is pleasurable. These services also have the staff with the expertise and the resources to answer young people's questions, to fill in the many (and often huge) gaps around sex ed.

Young people also like having someone to chat to. I work in clinics with young men, I've often been the only person they can talk to. They like a confidential space to chat about their lives, feelings (big time feelings) and worries. These kinds of trusting working relationships can be key in helping young people to improve or sustain their sexual health and well being.

So whilst offering services might increase access, I think we need to make sure that the quality, thoroughness and expertise are there too.

Cost of diabetes to the NHS

Research suggesting that diabetes will account for £16.9bn of the NHS budget within a generation prompted a debate among readers about the cost of treatment and the challenges faced by those with diabetes and the health service's approach to the condition.

As someone who suffers from hypoglycemia without an apparent diabetic element, I can empaphise with the many who suffer from diabetes, and know that it is not a disease that everyone brings on themselves through obesity. Thankfully I am able to self treat my low blood sugar by glucose tablets, but others are not so lucky. It is easy to blame individuals but society through its general lack of exercise, particularly for young people, is not helping. From age seven I walked to school and home again, a combined distance of three miles, exercised regularly in the playground ( I was one of those girls who muscled in on the boys football), went swimming (cheaply) at least once every week, and went on to play sports for my secondary school.

I have learned that eating too much, the wrong kinds of food, or just all the time, are often a sign of unhappiness in a human being and it occurs to me that the wrong kinds of available social activity generate their own punishments on us all. It is essential that along with the emphasis on more exercise we actually start understanding why so many people are not esepcially happy with their lot in life. Perhaps that will ensure the right kinds of social activity get a boost and cheer up a lot of the casualties we are now treating because of expedient policy making.

An interesting statement. A simple question - What proportion of the diabetes problem will be taken on by the private medical sector ? Or is this one of the illnesses that is so wide spread that the private sector does not want to take it on ? Let us have some balanced assessment from the media instead of knocking the NHS for political purposes. How about publishing private treatment costs for diabetes for a start and what percentage of the patients are treated by the private sector ?

While I agree that there is a general need to encourage healthier lifestyles, the problem is that the NHS gives out extremely mixed messages.

Firstly, the targets that the NHS sets for diabetes treatment aren't rigorous enough. I have T1 diabetes (a different condition to T2) but I see firsthand how T2s are treated. The gold standard for quality of diabetes control is the HbA1c test. People with an HbA1c of 6.5% or higher tend to suffer the expensive complications. Yet the NHS, in my experience seems remarkably accepting of people with T2, with A1cs in the 8-9% range and doesn't really push them to acheive better results ('normal' is broadly 4-5.5%).

Secondly, the NHS persists in putting forward completely outdated and incorrect dietary advice. T2s are told to reduce their intake of sugar and fat but also told to ensure that around 60% of their diet comes from starchy carbohydrates. All carbohydrates, once metabolised, become sugar in the blood. So the NHS advice is essentially that people with T2 diabetes get 60% of their calories from sugar. This further increases insulin resistance, which leads to greater insulin production, which leads to greater weight gain (fat is simply glucose converted for storage by insulin). Plus they have high blood sugars anyway. The diet recommended for T2s actually causes obesity AND complications. The irony of all this? There's only one food item that doesn't increase your blood sugar at all - fat.

The NHS needs to seriously re-evaluate its dietary advice AND its targets for treatment if it is to prevent people with T2 from developing complications.

There seems to be a general misunderstanding among people with Type 1 diabetes about the way Type 2 is treated these days.

There are over a million people using insulin in the UK but only around a third of these - say 300,000 at most - have Type 1 diabetes The remainder - say 800,000 or more - who use insulin have Type 2. They use insulin because it gives better control of blood glucose levels than tablets alone. Sir Steve Redgrave actually has Type 2 diabetes - one of the many Type 2s who use insulin to keep himself healthy. So the Guardian photo of a person injecting was absolutely appropriate despite what one of your posters said.

Insulin is expensive, especially the newer insulins which drug companies market aggressively to doctors although the older insulins do the same job almost as well, as NICE confirms. If doctors confined their prescribing to these older insulins they could help cut the drugs bill quite a bit.

Since at least 90 per cent of people with diabetes have Type 2, I think it is wholly appropriate for articles such as this to focus upon it and the outrage of your Type 1 correspondents is unreasonable. Moreover not all Type 2s are overweight. About 20 per cent of people diagnosed with Type 2 are slim and a healthy weight - although of course that does mean that the vast majority are obese or overweight.

But how do we prevent the tide of obesity that is overtaking us? Frankly no one knows.

Is it really just families on the breadline who are receiving these parcels or is the Guardian slipping into politician mode by throwing the word 'family' in every time there's a victim.It's as if a headline that many people are relying on food handouts wouldn't be enough, they need to be decent hardworking family victims. The deserving. Just a thought.

I work with kids from some of the poorest families in my area and no one here would like to hear this, but here it is: the vast majority of these families still have enough money for cigarettes and cheap booze, and in some cases Sky TV. Go figure...

This article has seriously made me cry, i'd love to be able to say what's happening is unbelievable in a developed society. Only thing is it's global fascism which has developed, in which wealth can only trickle-up to the parasitic few, everyone else must be impoverished at an ever accelerating rate to support their imaginary wealth.

What's happening is just the tip of the iceberg, there's far worse to come and when enough people are as desperate as these families, which will happen, there won't even be foodbanks by then. Normal people will be driven to destitution by the evil the political and corporate parasites inflict on us, unless we finally take the power back and demand participatory democracy and economics.

The Foodbank seems to have slipped into our way of life without a proper assessment as to why this kind of charity is needed, and what are the long term effects on those who need handouts, and why gross inequalities of income in countries such as Britain are no longer seen as a priority.

I work with some of the poorest and most vulnerable people in society and we have to keep packets of biscuits in the office at all times to have something on hand when they come to us with low blood sugar having not eaten for three days and walked five miles to get to us, otherwise we've had clients faint, fall asleep or just be too unwell to continue the interview.

My boss also uses the biscuits as an icebreaker having learned that if you can get them to share a packet of biccies with you, it's much easier to bring up the subject of food parcels and make it less embarrassing to need a handout. In 15 months working there no one has asked if they could have a food parcel, but we give them to about a third of our clients in collaboration with the local church run shelter and foodbank (which in non Trussell Trust). I am amazed by how stoic people are, risking their health to get to us (our clients are disabled) and often declining help because they don't want to take it from the 'needy'.

We help them access benefits and crisis loans and much as I was cynical when I started (and remain so) I haven't seen the kind or people you caricature. Although I do phone Sky and Virgin a lot to try and get them to allow people to break the contracts they took out when times were better, but they get locked into and then taken to court over because both companies make it damned hard to get out of a contract even when people lose their jobs and try to be honest about their finances. I wish life was as simple and one dimensional as you try to make out...

Coventry is a place close to my heart: seems to me we're in serious trouble when somewhere with such a fantastic history of production (the oft repeated series of industries over the centuries went ribbon weaving to clockmaking to bicycles to motorbikes to motorcars to... nothing) has a significant number of people who cannot even afford to feed themselves.

I am involved with one of these, which is managed by a group of local churches. regrettably, the need is growing rapidly, and while it could be argued that we are doing the government's job ofr them, if we don't do it, then who will?

Annejennette SI'm going to see about setting a food bank up in my area although I know there is 1 in the neighbouring town, so much poverty around and we all need a boost sometimes! I remember as a child my mother collecting butter cheese and stewing steak on producing her benefit book, the government done away with this assistance so brill ideas food banks!

Nintendo losses - what went wrong?

I think a lack of serious 3rd party support for their consoles in this generation leaves them unable to compete on a wider scale, their first party games are good but the series are getting a bit stale, their third party support consists of little but shovelware of dubious quality

They were phasing the Wii out to concentrate on their next console. Because of this, they didn't release many games for it. Given that most of the Wii's software output is due to Nintendo themselves, this hampered sales.

The 3DS launched with next to no games, hysterical tabloid reports about how the machine rapes your eyeballs, and a lot of people thought it was just a DS in 3D rather than a new handheld. Finally, the fact that the 3DS was launched directy after a tsunami which adversely affected the Japanese economy, could not have helped matters.

It is worth remembering though, that although Nintendo posted a 43billion yen loss, this is still far less than the 65billion they were predicting.

And I agree with Callous above, the one thing they definitely shouldn't do is make games for smartphones.Nintendo - doomed since 1889.

Those claiming Nintendo should make games for phones..don't seem to realise that Nintendo made around 4 times as much in revenue from gaming ... as the ENTIRE iPhone App store did in FY2011.

Releasing a few games on the iPhone would make them a bit of short term cash..but utterly destroy their business model in a couple of years as their money comes from hardware, software and licence fees from third parties. Their hardware and licencing revenues would be decimated if they released on another format.

Nintendo's major problems have been some extremely unfounded negative media coverage (certainly in regards to the 3DS being a headache machine), some crazy reporting from analysts (who misinform on a regular basis) and a gaming media who are only interested on reporting on "mature" shooting games...plus a mass of people who think it's ok to illegally download games (ie steal) as opposed to pay for them.

if Nintendo hadn't felt forced to drop the 3DS price (largely thanks to the negative media campaign against the machine) they would have made a profit.

Still..it's strange that Nintendo is always seen as "doomed" by the media..when they are one of the few game companies to actually have made a profit in the last decade.

Nintendo may have lost a few hundred thousand this year......but Sony has lost around 4 billion dollars in their gaming division since the launch of the PS3......and Microsoft has also lost around 4 billion dollars since they entered the gaming market.

I've had lots of great memories over the years of Nintendo consoles. The NES was my first ever console and was the real introduction to gaming for me. I then had the SNES, which the fondest memory for me was arguing with my Megadrive-owning friends over who was better between Sonic or Mario. The N64 was ok – some of the 1st party games such as Mario 64, F-Zero, Ocarina of Time and Goldeneye are some of the best games I've ever played but I think this console was over-shadowed a little by the PSOne for me. The Gamecube is actually one of my favourite consoles of all time. The games selection wasn't the best but the games themselves were some of the best I can remember. I think having this alongside the PS2 made the early 2000's probably my favourite time in gaming.

Nintendo was caught trying to do two things at once: the touch screen and internet-capable DSi lost the battle for those two areas with the iPod Touch, and lost the gaming battle with Sony and Xbox. The 3DS was an attempt to reconcile a irretrievable situation.

I see only one was forward for Nintendo: choose a frontier in which no product has been released yet, then dominate it the way Apple dominates the touch screen

Brian A:

As for Nintendo's losses, it is the first time since they switched to gaming. With a 5+ year old primary console, an underwhelming 3DS launch, and a strong yen, it's no wonder they had a loss. With 3DS sales picking up and a new primary console launching this year, it seems likely that they'll go back in the green again.

Matt C:

Nintendo is great, but I think they've made the mistake of marketing to children too much instead of adults or teenagers, aside from the Wii exercise selling point, which was actually a good idea.

James N:

The Mario Kart series is basically the reason I bought 2 DSes and a Wii, that and Mario Bros completely worth it. Smash brothers and others were awesome and lets not forget Golden Eye brought the beauty of FPS to console only players, exploding the FPS scene. Call of Duty/Battlefield franchises should send them money out of respect.